Waking
by RainFlame
Summary: Axel wakes up as a Nobody for the first time. Rated only for severe injury and death.


I woke up, confused and choking.

Smoke was everywhere, filling my lungs and making me cough myself into wakefulness.

I didn't recognize anything around me. I was lying in a street of some kind. People were screaming and rushing around. Everything around me was aglow with reflected light.

Something was on fire.

"You alright, Son?"

I blinked at the voice and turned my eyes to the old man peering down at me. He had a large nose and a closely trimmed beard, but nothing else was remarkable about him. I couldn't say that I knew him.

"What's going on?" I rasped.

"The old church caught on fire," the man replied, offering me a hand. I accepted and was hoisted to my feet with a grunt from the elderly gentleman. "You hurt?"

I shook my head. My eyes were drawn away from his face to the glowing space in the sky. The church he talked about must have been several blocks over. People were bustling through the streets, the collective mass heading for the countryside with whatever they could carry strapped to their backs or in carts.

"The mayor has ordered an evacuation. Every building in the town is made of wood. It won't take it long to spread," the man said by way of explanation. "Where're your parents?"

I opened my mouth as if I had some kind of reflexive response, but nothing came out. Where were they?

Who were they?

"I don't…I don't know," I responded. "I don't remember…"

"It's alright, Son," the old man said, putting a hand on my shoulder. I almost shrugged it off, but the something in his touch stopped me. "You can come with us, if you'd like. It's just me and the wife, but I'm sure she won't mind." He smiled kindly.

It was tempting. He had an honest face and a kind look about him, and as hundreds of people pushed through the streets bent on escape, he had stopped to help me, some dirty orphan lying in the middle of the road. But I shook my head. For some reason, I had to get to that fire.

Wait, orphan?

Whatever. It didn't matter.

I half expected the old man to protest my decision, but he only nodded. "Alright, Son. God Speed. If you need anything, we'll be out with the rest of them."

I thanked him before rushing off through the cold night, fighting the flow of traffic to get to the burning block of town.

I arrived after what seemed like an eternity of running. The smoke was thicker than it had been several streets over and I thought I was lucky to not be suffocating right about now. Or even burning. Shouldn't it be really hot this close to a large fire?

But it didn't really bother me, only creating a mild discomfort I easily ignored as I moved for the church.

Well, I thought it was the church. I wouldn't have recognized it in the first place, much less now that it was nothing but a blazing inferno. The firefighters in the town had long since given up on saving it, opting instead to move on to other "more important" buildings.

I wanted to go inside. Something was pulling at me, compelling me. I wanted to be in there.

But no matter how much I wanted in, my instincts held me back. Fire was hot, no matter what my body was telling me. Fire burned, no matter how much I might think otherwise.

So I settled down to wait. I waited until the evening had passed into late night and the fire had all but burned itself out in this corner of the town. My patience wore out when the building was not much more than dying embers and a few flames.

I stepped over the threshold, which really wasn't much of a threshold now. There wasn't even a ceiling anymore. All that was left was a few charred pews and the communion table at the front of the church. Why did I come here? What did I need to see?

I was drawn to a corner, arguably the most badly damaged area of the church. The remains of the ceiling had fallen in, completely obscuring the corner from sight. I bent down to pick up a beam and wrapped my hands underneath it. I felt a warm sensation and jerked back, certain I had just put my hands into flame.

Upon examination, though, I realized my hands were unburned. There was fire underneath that beam alright, but it did nothing to me. Interesting.

This time, I picked up the beam without care, unheeding of the fire. If it didn't burn me, then what was there to worry about?

Well, it didn't hurt me, but the poor creature under the beam wasn't so lucky.

There, curled into the corner, were two red pools of melted plastic and the skeletal remains of a child.

I remembered.

_I had done everything I could think of. There was no place left to turn to. I was out of ideas and options._

_I was tired. So tired. I had tried everything I could think of, from digging through trash to looking for a job. No one was interested in hiring a lice-infested, malnourished kid, and no one seemed to have the heart enough to throw out a few extra scraps for one, either._

_I had tried to live like this for the past five months, since Grandmother died and left me alone. Five whole months of slowly starving to death in this strangely harsh winter, where food was too scarce to share and hearts too frozen to care._

_But tonight, it didn't really matter anymore. I was out of time._

_I had been kicked out of the homeless shelter this morning by some thug with a bad attitude. He claimed I stole his food and beat me up until I ran out the door. I had the broken ribs to prove it. Breathing put me in a world of pain. The town doctor had refused to see me. I had no way to pay._

_I was at the end of my rope, and I knew it. I was alone, freezing, scared, starving, and in the most intense pain I had ever experienced. I missed Grandmother and I missed being safe. _

_And as young as I was, I knew tonight I would die. _

_Temperatures had been unreasonably cold this winter. It would get well below freezing tonight, and without the proper food, clothing or even a scrap of a blanket, I would freeze to death._

_That or drown. I heard the disconcerting way my breath rattled as I inhaled. I had read somewhere about how your lungs could be punctured when you broke your ribs, then they fill with fluid. _

_I smirked to myself as I carefully settled into the corner of the church building. They say to lose hope is to lose your heart. Guess this made me heartless._

_As if on cue, my heart contracted painfully. Probably my broken ribs pressing on it. I gasped in agony and waited for the sensation to pass._

_Well, no matter. I was tired of being cold and hungry, anyway. I was tired of being scared. I was ready to meet my Maker and leave all of this behind._

_I laughed softly, but it turned into a cough that spewed blood everywhere and sent me back into that mind-numbing pain. It took longer to fade than the strange heart pain had._

_Well, I may be hungry and alone and scared out of my mind, but I wasn't going to die cold. It was one comfort I could give myself before leaving this world for good._

_It probably wasn't the brightest idea, but I brought out the box of matches and struck one. It burned bright and beautiful in my hand, warming my fingertips in its glow. I wanted to feel like that all over._

_With the slow, painstaking moves of a drowning, pained, frozen body, I sat up and tossed the match onto a nearby pew._

_The old, dry wood caught almost instantly. It didn't take too long for the whole thing to be engulfed in flame. I watched idly as a tendril of flame snaked away from it and toward the wall._

_I smiled and pulled my Frisbees close to me. My only friends in this world, and my only possessions. This was the way to go. Hopeless, but warm._

_Heartless._

I blinked at the sudden onslaught of memories.

Lea?

Was this me? This corpse before me? We shared the same memories, it seemed, but were we the same? Did this make me dead, too? Some kind of living dead, perhaps?

I brought up a finger to just below my jaw line. No pulse to be found.

Well, that ruled out exclusively alive, anyway.

I picked up a splintered piece of wood and nicked my finger. I expected bright red to come flowing from the wound, or perhaps nothing at all, if I was in fact dead. But instead, darkness billowed from the wound. It was like a heavy, thick fog of black that fell from the opening and scattered like fine flour at my feet.

That ruled out dead, too. The dead didn't bleed, if this counted as bleeding.

"Well, that doesn't leave us a lot, does it, Lea?" I asked the pile of bones.

I wanted to leave, to get out of here, but something held me back.

I stared at the bones until I knew what it was. I couldn't just leave him…me…here.

But what was I supposed to do?

Finally, I took off my shirt. The air was warm with the fire now, but I knew I'd be missing it later. Somehow that didn't matter, though. I reverently gathered the bones down to the last broken shards of rib and placed them in the shirt. I scraped up the melted Frisbees as best I could and added them to the bundle. Lea wouldn't want to leave them.

I folded them up and carried them outside into the frigid night. My feet took me outside the town and into the forest beyond. I didn't go too far into it, though. Lea didn't like the dark. Neither did I.

I found a small clearing underneath an old pine tree with several Hellebore plants growing around it. The hearty winter plants had red blossoms, and Lea liked red, I think. At least, that was the color of his Frisbees.

I found a thick limb on the ground and dug a small hole with it in the frozen earth. I then lowered the shirt with its bundle into the ground and covered it up with dirt. I fashioned a cross from two sticks tied together and placed a couple of flowers from the Hellebore over the freshly turned grave.

I sat back to inspect my handy work. "Well, what do you think, Lea? Beats a burned out church, doesn't it?"

A screech owl hooted overhead somewhere and a winter cricket chirped not far away.

"Guess it's not exactly ritzy, but what can you expect? It's a grave."

I stared at the grave, not sure what I was waiting around for. A response? Not likely.

"I should be sad, shouldn't I?" I asked suddenly, surprised by the thought. "I mean, you're me, aren't you? Shouldn't I be a little torn up about this?"

I got no answered from the chilly breeze, nor the owl or the crickets. I couldn't even bring myself to cry. Maybe the living dead just didn't cry. Maybe we didn't get sad.

"Well, sorry you're dead," I added lamely. Apparently we weren't eloquent, either.

"Sweet dreams, Lea."

I got up and walked away, past the town and onward. It was hard to leave Lea behind, for some reason. I wanted nothing more than to turn back and sit by his grave until I myself died.

But I didn't turn around. Confused and lost, I walked on. The further I went, the easier it was to keep going.

I didn't look back.

* * *

There you have it. My version of how Axel was "born". Keep in mind I've never played 358/2 Days. What little information I've been able to glean came from other fics and a Kingdom Hearts wiki. Please let me know if something isn't accurate. If it doesn't drastically change the story, I'll fix it.

I'd also like to know if this would be better as a one shot, or if you'd like to see more up until he joins the Organization, or maybe how all the other Nobodies died? I can't say I have many ideas on the topic, but if people are interested enough, I'd be happy to consider it :]

Please review, if you would. I thrive on them :) Have a great week!

God Bless,

-RainFlame


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